AAS 2026

I had the good fortune to attend the 2026 Association for Asian Studies Conference in Vancouver this month. I say ‘fortune’ because I nearly missed the deadline to submit abstracts. Knowing that they don’t accept too many individual proposals, I also pitched a pre-conference workshop, which, amazingly, got approved. It was my first time attending the behemoth event—with nearly 4,000 participants, organizers said it broke their record.

My workshop, titled Finding Creative Inspiration through Chinese Literature, was essentially a half-day version of the Chinese composition course I re-designed at the University of Malta. In the class, I provide students with passages from acclaimed Chinese authors in their original form and, after discussing the stylistic features, assign them a creative prompt. The goal is to model one’s own writing on these great pieces of literature. I always stressed the critical decision-making behind the prose, however, rather than focus on regurgitating the grammar. For example, in class, we might discuss other sentence structures that convey the same idea and why/how they would alter the tone or emotional impact of the story. I ran the course three times in Malta and have wanted to turn it into a general-interest writer’s notebook or online workshop. Where my university course was aimed specifically at Chinese-learners, I want the notebook and general course to be bilingual, with original passages supplemented by recognized English translations. AAS gave me the perfect setting for a test run!

I was so worried no one would sign up for the workshop. Thankfully, people showed interest. We had seven participants, a couple of whom could not read Chinese. Some were interested in the language aspect, some in the literary; some had done creative writing courses before, while it was the first time for others; all in all, my target audience. Not to mention the fact that they were all adults who had volunteered their time and resources to be there, as opposed to a BA student with a checklist of course credits to fulfil. Afterwards, they kindly completed a survey that gave me fantastic feedback, which I will use to take the project forward.

I’m really proud of how the sample workbook turned out!

I spent the rest of the conference exploring the book exhibition, discussing various projects with editors, catching up with a few friends I knew would be attending, and meeting new people working on related research. I feel reinvigorated with my research and life more generally, and I want to build on this momentum.